March Marketing Madness

“March Madness” is upon us once again. Arguably one of the most exciting events in all of sports, the NCAA tournament takes 65 of the country’s best college basketball teams and whittles them down to a national champion in only three weekends. The tournament also brings people together across the entire country, as friends and co-workers compete in betting pools where picking the correct winners can lead to bragging rights, fortune, and fame. And these games can foster strong positive morale among the students whose schools are competing. But do the winning colleges offer better value for students? It’s an important question, especially since many impressionable high school seniors decide which colleges to attend at the same time that the tournament plays out.

Do students actually pick their colleges based on something as frivolous as basketball games? Maybe not entirely, but sports play a prominent role in many students’ decisions. Consider the case of Gonzaga University. Its basketball team significantly improved its performance from 1998 to 2004, and the school’s enrollment leapt by 27%, while applications doubled. Even Gonzaga’s president admitted that most of the rise in student applications was “attributable in great part to basketball.” A similar game plan unfolded at George Mason University: after reaching the “Final Four” in 2006, the school blasted email messages to 300,000 prospective students, explicitly stating, “If you remain interested in attending a world-class university with one HECK of a basketball team, we urge you to complete your application.”

In these ways, colleges often use sports as a major form of advertising and publicity, just like any other aggressive business trying to lure in customers. In fact, despite the (admittedly small) risk of being punished, many colleges allow their sports programs to engage in significant rules violations, because they know that an edge in sports performance can translate into significant financial winnings off the field. It seems that Groucho Marx was on the right track when he once jokingly implied that, if given the choice, universities would probably tear down their classrooms before tearing down their sports stadiums.

Some people may think that college sports marketing is not that big a deal, especially if it helps students learn about promising schools they may never have heard of otherwise. After all, Gonzaga and George Mason (and their competitors) are not necessarily bad schools. However, the problem is that students can make serious mistakes by choosing colleges based primarily on sports and other “marketing madness.” For example, this kind of decision-making can lead students to overlook risky college features like high costs, high debt, or educational weaknesses in the specific subjects each student wants to study.

Unfortunately, these are exactly the kinds of financial problems that hamper too many of today’s students. Although students pursue college degrees as a ticket to success, many of them graduate with $23,000 or more in student loans (plus grad school debt), and then earn much lower salaries than they expect, leading to significant delays in personal milestones like getting married and having kids. Therefore, about half of student loan borrowers regret borrowing as much money for college as they did, and one out of five borrowers give up their career dreams and obtain higher paying jobs in order to afford their loan bills. Therefore, applicants need to approach their college decisions with appropriate thoughtfulness and caution.

And it’s not just new college students that can be misled by college sports; current enrollees can be similarly affected. Professor Murray Sperber of Indiana University has suggested that many colleges support their sports programs in an effort to distract students from the fact that they are paying too much for their education, or receiving too little for their money. He has called this diversion a system of “Beer and Circus.”

These are important ideas for applicants, students, and their families to remember as they watch the NCAA tournament and decide which colleges to attend. College consumers would be wise to ignore sports, and focus instead on the costs, debt, and academic quality represented by each college they consider. In that way, students may be able to make good college decisions…regardless of which school wins the tournament.